Novel Ideas: Twilight

Novel Ideas ends the year with our 100th episode, a pseudo-special that we’ve talked about doing since the early days. We recorded ourselves discussing Twilight by Stephenie Meyer in the form of a drinking game. There were official rules, but the real rule was to invent rules as the discussion developed. It’s pretty fun and we’re not that much less coherent than usual. In this episode we talk about: literary tourism, free will, stalker-ish behavior, and hear a pretty surprising take on Bella v. Katniss as strong characters. We also get into Edward’s middle name, whether the northwest US has thunderstorms, the amazing untold stories happening in the background, and (of course) #feminism. And in this longer than average episode, we also discuss aspects of vampires: lore, stalking, hipster tendencies, racism, and baseball. Expect a few broken brains and misunderstandings of how biology works.

The music bump is “Supermassive Black Hole” by Muse, because Stephanie Meyer loves her some Muse.

We’re going to omit our ratings for this episode as we read this before Gabs left for grad school, but didn’t record it for a year. And now it’s been several months since the recording, so our rating wouldn’t be that fair. Also, everybody already knows what Twilight is and aren’t likely to decide to read it or not based on our silly rating. However, here is the link to “Growing Up Cullen” that Ben read as a refresher instead of reading the book a second time.